A Story of Loss, Discovery, and Selflessness by the Best Storyteller in Abilene, Texas

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Try a little bit of everything every week. Say free this week into your Xfinity voice remote. This is Our American Stories, and up next, a listener's story from KWKC 1340 AM in Abilene, Texas. Jay Moore is a retired history teacher who's known for his fascinating and humorous presentations about his own city's history. And today, Jay brings us a story from the area. It's a deeply personal one about his grandma.

Here's Jay. It was after my grandmother had passed away that I realized just how deeply her lack of education embarrassed her. I think it was a secret shame that she carried. In her naughty pine panel den, there were bookshelves that were filled with hardback books. That was the room that she used the most.

Watching her soap operas or crocheting, working a jigsaw puzzle, visiting with family members. But I never one time saw her with one of those books in her lap. Following her death in 1992, it was my dad who came to own the contents of those bookshelves. And so one day I sat down to look over the books and see if there were any that I might enjoy reading. The first book I picked up was the historical fiction of Katherine Marshall.

It was titled Christie. On the first page, I saw in my grandmother's familiar handwriting that she had written this. This is one of the best books that I have read. For that reason alone, I thought I might like to read it as well.

And I started a stack to take to my car. Picking up another book, I noticed the same handwritten notation in a 50s era novel. Ditto for the third book and the fourth book and really nearly all the rest. It seemed odd that she would record such thoughts as though she herself might one day pick the book back up and be reminded that it was worth reading.

But it slowly dawned on me. She was not writing introspective analysis nor trying to convey the quality to a future reader who might pick the book from her shelf. She wrote comments in the front of books she never read because her elementary level education shamed her to write those fake reactions.

She wrote them to throw others off the scent. When Granny was 14, she took a trip west from her home near Waco, Texas, to visit her family in Runnels County, which was about 120 miles west. On that trip, she met a neighbor of her relatives who was nine years older and who would become my grandfather.

The following fall in 1923, they were married. Granny was 15 and my granddad was 24. They lived in a two-room board and batten house that my granddad built on some land that his parents had given to him so that he could farm. It was in that house that Granny gave birth at age 16. I never knew if a doctor or even a neighbor was available to help with the birth, but in the end, the baby girl was dead. A small box was fashioned to serve as a coffin, and my grandfather alone took the box to the cemetery east of Winters, Texas. He placed the child in the earth next to another infant. That infant was his own brother, who also had died at birth, so he buried his daughter to the side of his own brother. Sixteen is young to be a mother, much less one who is grieving, and I wonder just how my grandmother coped inside that little house.

By the time she was 18, she had a healthy baby boy, followed by five more sons. When I was growing up, we were often at Granny and Granddaddy's house. Upstairs at the end of their hall was my grandfather's office. On the wall was a large, framed family tree that a draftsman friend had drawn for him. It was comforting to see the generations diagrammed in the logic of family connections. Their sons were the branches, and my dad was near the tree's middle.

But it was the first branch, the one down low, that was intriguing to me, a very short branch that was just labeled infant. My grandfather died in 1985, and in just a short time, my grandmother's sons had convinced her to sell the house that she had lived in for 35 years, and to disseminate all the furniture and the dishes and the family tree. She moved to a smaller house, but before long, she moved from there to a nursing home when she was 84. During those days of her living in just one room with commercial furniture and a view of an empty field, I stopped by several times each week, and my grandmother and I had conversations.

Some of them were short, but others were long enough that by the end she had fallen asleep. We discussed our family, church, what was happening in the news. I don't recall how it was, but on one visit, we talked about that family tree, and I brought up that lowest branch. Granny told me the story of the unnamed baby girl and the burial and those difficult days that she went through so long ago.

She bemoaned that she had never visited the grave, and now she couldn't even remember the name of the cemetery and was only vaguely familiar with its location somewhere east of Winters, Texas. But she knew a woman still living in Winters who would know, and I sensed that she was asking me to go on a mission for her. That is how I came to drive 40 miles south from my house to pick up Leona Billups one day at her small home.

Leona had known my grandparents for most of her life. She had me drive east on a farm to Market Road, and she told me of the one-time community known as Truett. The one-room school community was long gone, and really the only remnant was the Truett Cemetery. Finally, we came across a green sign pointing to Truett Cemetery, although it was actually pointing at a gate into a farmer's field.

And since it was raining, we didn't go any farther. The next day I went to see Granny, caught her up on Leona's life and all about her family, and I told her that I knew the approximate location of the cemetery, but that I would have to go back and open the gate and drive down the rutted path. Granny told me then that her infant daughter was buried beside the other baby, my granddad's brother, but she said she was not even sure if that grave was marked.

On my second trip south, I took a friend. We arrived at the gate opposite the Truett Cemetery sign. We drove slowly through the tall grass between tire ruts before coming to a second gate. Soon, we saw a fence at the end of the half-mile path.

The fence surrounded a square plot of land with a wide silver gate that had welded metal letters spelling out Truett on top. And just inside the gate were some headstones that were visible, but others were far back among cactus and yuccas and grass that seemed prime real estate for snakes, and we hadn't brought anything like hose or shovels to hack at that growth or to ward off reptiles. I stepped in to begin a hunt for a headstone I was not sure even existed.

The markers were spread far apart, and there was no evidence of any row or path like there is in most cemeteries. I gingerly stepped over cactus and cautiously examined the etched stones to see if there was one with my last name. Towards the back corner, I used my heel to push over a yucca growing right next to a small stone, and behind the plant was a weathered inscription cut into a sandstone marker reading, Infant Son of D.S.

and M.F. Moore, Daniel Spurgeon and Mary Frances, my great-grandparents, the grave of my granddad's brother. A smile of relief came, for there was the spot where my grandfather had laid his daughter nearly seventy years before. The next day, seated by Granny's bed, I watched her face register a strange relief. An eighty-four-year-old mother who had never forgotten a daughter who had never breathed life. Granny had finally found the child that she had given birth to when she was just sixteen. A few days later, she told me that she had decided to put a marker on the grave, and she asked me to go to the monument company to choose one and to pick one similar in size to the one marking the adjoining grave.

She said that she wanted the marker to have a lamb on it, and she had decided on a name for her infant daughter. The name was Dixie Lee. Dixie was my granny's name, and so I asked, for you?

No, she said, Dixie Lee was the name of Bing Crosby's wife, and I always liked her. A few weeks later, I returned to Truett Cemetery, followed by a truck from the monument company. But because I was not sure on which side Dixie Lee was buried, my grandmother had told me to just choose one. I chose the north side, putting her that much closer to her mother. For the past thirty summers, I've returned to Truett Cemetery and to the grave of Dixie Lee, and there I've cleared the growth and smoothed the ground, marking the site of Granny's never-forgotten child. My grandmother, Dixie Moore, died only a few months after she found her daughter. And my goodness, what a beautiful story, and a special thanks to Jay Moore, and a special thanks to Robbie for doing a beautiful job on the production. Jay Moore's story, his grandmother's story, a beautiful family story, here on Our American Stories. My heart lands for a quest to unlock a limited edition UGC item.

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